History
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How Buddhism Became Navayana
When Dr BR Ambedkar converted to Buddhism on 14 October 1956 in Nagpur, he was not simply changing his religion. He was making a powerful social and political statement. However, the Buddhism he adopted was not exactly the same as…
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How Irrigation Made Rice Foundation of Indian Civilisation
Rice did not become India’s dominant grain overnight. Its rise took thousands of years of migration, farming innovation, and above all, irrigation. The history of rice is the history of how people learned to control water.
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The Areca Nut in The Betel Leaf
After meals, a quid of betel leaf wrapped around some areca nut and lime, perfumed with cardamom, clove, nutmeg, mace, and camphor — the five aromatics known collectively as pancha-sugandha — served to aid digestion and sweeten the breath.
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The Itihasa of Prithviraj Chauhan
Long before the nationalist imagination got to work, two older traditions had already told very different stories about the same king, and neither of them had any use for a hero.
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Civilisations, Time and the Turning Wheel
Financial crises, endless wars, political polarisation, demographic decline, climate anxiety and the rise of new global powers have made many wonder whether civilisations can also decline.
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Did Indra Eat Buffaloes?
We live in times, where people want to ban goat sacrifice during the Muslim observance of Bakra Eid, on grounds of compassion. This overt attack on Islamic rituals is also a covert attack on subaltern Hindu practices — where goddesses…
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Did Proto-Naxals fight the East India Company?
Today, the word Naxal is used casually by politicians and businessmen to demonise anyone protesting against exploitation as anti-national. This does not bode well for a country where a large proportion of the youth are unemployed and risk a bleak…
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Secrets of Bihar’s Mirrored Caves
One of the most striking experiences near Rajgir in Bihar lies inside the Barabar Caves. The walls are polished to such perfection that they are like mirrors. These surfaces were carved and finished over 2,300 years ago, yet they still…
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Historical Reality of Pre-colonial Learning in India
Dharampal’s book, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), is a groundbreaking historical work that used official British colonial archives to challenge the narrative that pre-colonial India was uneducated.
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The Tale of Two Somnaths
Loud discussions on how Muslim raiders from Ghazni plundered Somnath temple, on the Gujarat coast a thousand years ago, ignore how Jain ‘basadi’ in Karnataka were replaced by Somanatha Shiva temples around the same time. This is also the time…
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Can a French man be a ‘civilisational Hindu’?
In New India, an Italian woman with an Indian passport remains a ‘foreigner’, but a French man with an Indian passport becomes a ‘civilisational Hindu’, and is even asked to influence young impressionable minds by creating ‘decolonised’ school textbooks.
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How Shankara Became a Mythic Hero
The Shankara legend is less about history and more about imagination – how India turned a philosopher into a divine hero, a world conqueror, and a unifier of its sacred geography.
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Is the Hamsa an Indian Goose or a European Swan?
The bar-headed goose (hansa) is a key cultural symbol of India, along with other waterfowl such as the sarus crane (krauncha), ruddy shelduck (chakravaka) and crane (baga, bagula). This list excludes the swan (raj-hansa), which is European, not Indian. But…
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China’s Eternal Loop
Just as India is torn between the academician’s truth and the politician’s truth, so is China. But relative to India’s history which is strongly based on diversity, Chinese history is a product of unification.
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Was Macaulay Anti-India Or Anti-Brahmin?
The debate around Macaulay, English, and education is not just about colonialism. It is about whether India wants a future shaped by open inquiry or a past shaped by inherited authority.
